Ventilator II remote footswitch question

[RogerB]

On 9/30/2020 at 2:18 AM, mate stubb said:

I have my Vent 2 in my rack. The footswitch jack controls speed only. However...

 

I drilled a small hole in the chassis and brought out another jack which parallels the bypass switch on the chassis. In my case, I have a momentary bypass switch on the front of my rack, but one could easily plug in a remote footswitch on a longer cable.

I sympathise with the OP -- it's frankly astonishing, given the depth of detail design in most of the Vent 2, that the optional remote footswitch can't activate Bypass. I'd be really interested to know more detail on how you did this, as most of the Vent 2's switching seems to be slightly unconventional and it'd be an expensive box to screw up... And there appear to be no pictures on the entire internet of the inside of the thing! Thanks!

[lawman]

I'm a little late to this party, but I've found a nifty workaround that cries out to be shared.

I like the Neo-Instruments remote footswitch for my Vent II. However, I don't need its STOP function, just SLOW/FAST, and I need the extra room on the floor that I would get by using a single button switch. I won't describe what I tried that DIDN'T work. 

What DID work is this: I took the TRS cable connected to the Vent II's remote jack and plugged the other end into the female TRS connector of a 6" Y-cable adapter. The adapter has two 1/4" male TS-type plugs on the other end, and they are (most conveniently!) labeled "Tip" and "Ring," respectively. I connected the plug labeled "Ring" into a Boss FS-5U footswitch and - VOILA! - the Boss toggles between SLOW and FAST. 

This is consistent with rogs' information that the Ring, and not the Tip, is the proper connection, so rogs deserves the credit for this idea.

Incidentally, the Neo-Instruments remote footswitch is unlatched. Also, the above procedure works regardless of the polarity setting on the Boss unit.

[dbran]

I can confirm that lawman's method in the previous post works great, have been doing it for years. You can get "Slow/Fast" switching (and nothing else, no stop or bypass) with a simple footswitch this way. I stumbled across the method in this thread:

 

https://organforum.com/forums/forum/electronic-organs-midi/hammond-organs/33638-diy-swtch-for-neo-vent-2?32998-DIY-swtch-for-neo-vent-2=

 

You do have to put the Ventilator II into the correct switching mode for it to work. In my case, using a Boss FS-5L latching switch, I set switching to mode 4 (what the ventilator manual calls "momentary," but actually is appropriate for a LATCHING remote switch), and then set remote switch mode to "Switch 1" (secondary knob function to 7:00) which is again described as "momentary" but actually is correct for LATCHING switches -- the Vent's response is what's "momentary," so the switch itself needs to be latched so that the connection stays on or off.

 

For these switching modes, the manual describes the connections as:

"Ring to Sleeve: Slow/Fast
Tip to Sleeve: stop"

 

And that's exactly what you get when using the "ring" half of a TRS insert cable. Because no tip-to-sleeve connection is ever being made, the stop command never happens, and the ring-to-sleeve connection (or lack thereof) switches you back and forth from slow to fast.

 

For an unlatching switch as in lawman's post above, I would guess that you need to put the ventilator into "latching" switch mode, so that its response "latches" to a momentary command sent by an unlatched switch.